Pursuit
by Purloined Letter
Summary: [AU-Lumos 'Verse] In pursuit of a vanished Pokémon that appears to be the latest in a string, a private investigator specializing in retrieving missing or stolen Pokémon, Alicia Bale, follows the trail of the truth throughout Hoenn with the help of her loyal Absol, Shadow, and a rather uncooperative League registrar named Cassidy. They won't much like what they find, however...


Hope everyone enjoys! This is the second story to take place in Lumos 'Verse, though you don't have to read Endeavor to understand what's going on in this one (it takes place in the same universe, but is wholly unrelated to Endeavor's events. Endeavor has some helpful world-building and backstory for Lumos 'Verse in general, but that's about it.)

* * *

**HOENN LEAGUE PROMISES FULL INVESTIGATION OF BIZARRE STRING OF ROBBERIES**

**STRANGE POK****ÉMART ** **THEFTS CONTINUE TO PLAGUE THE REGION**

**PUBLIC ASKED TO COME FORWARD WITH ANY INFORMATION ABOUT STRING OF ODD THEFTS; LARGE REWARD NOW OFFERED**

**FALLARBOR MART LATEST TO FALL VICTIM TO THE '****POK****ÉMART BANDITS'**

Alicia Bale, thirty-five year old proud lifelong Hoennite and current resident of Pacifidlog Town in the southeastern part of the region, sipped her coffee and studied the old newspaper clippings in front of her intently, her small, round light wooden kitchen table covered in clippings and items pinned or taped together. The early morning sun was filtering in softly through her kitchen window and glinting off the ocean outside, giving the 'lived-in messy, NOT gross messy' as Alicia liked to put wooden home that she lived in a warm glow, the scent of her recently cooked bacon still hanging in the air along with the bracing scent of the sea so familiar to a Hoenn native. She pulled her shoulder-length, somewhat frizzy curly honey brown hair back into a loose bun as Alicia concentrated on the letter she'd been waiting on for the past two weeks, her half-eaten scrambled eggs, bacon and toast summarily shoved aside and forgotten in the wake of receiving a somewhat beat up-looking letter addressed in Common with a postmark from Kanto. She tore open the letter, hoping against hope that she might finally be able to make some headway.

_Miss Bale,_

_I'll start by apologizing before I continue, because I doubt my response will answer much aside from your initial question._

_I've run the picture of the Great Ball you attached to your letter by a few members of the Research and Development team over the past week as well as by our president himself, and we do find it worrying that it bears our mark considering that it's most definitely not of our manufacture or design, or one of our prototypes. Frankly, it seems like an ordinary Great Ball in appearance and specification aside from the odd locking mechanism that you mentioned. It definitely is non-standard and doesn't seem to match any of the currently registered designs of either Devon Corp. or Silph Co. from the pictures that you sent. Our Pokéball developers would actually need it shipped it out to us for further analysis, however, as they can't tell much about the build or function from photographs._

_It's not uncommon for rogue Pokéballs made by companies other than us or Devon Corp, or even private individuals, to crop up now and again in various places, especially the regions where poaching is more of a concern, but considering that most breeders generally register their Pokémon to a Pokéball of one variety or another almost immediately after hatching to help prevent poaching, there's not much of a market for them beyond wholesaling to the various breeders these days. It's not like before the Great Plague, when trainers would actually wander around with empty Pokéballs of various sorts in the hopes of catching wild Pokémon they'd come across._

_I might recommend running it past the Devon Corporation there in Hoenn if you haven't yet? Perhaps they could help more by examining the Great Ball in person._

_Kind regards,_

_Terrence Feld, __Public Inquiries Division_

_Silph Company, Saffron City Headquarters_

"I knew it," Alicia muttered under her breath in her native Hoennese, emerald green eyes narrowed in suspicion as her eyes bored into the letter as if she could coerce it to say something different. The private investigator specializing in missing or stolen Pokémon search and recovery felt the irritation of rapidly getting nowhere flooding her veins. "And I _did _run it by Devon out here with no luck, which is the _entire reason_ I wrote to you guys at Silph in the first place," she finished to the absent Terrence with a grumble before quickly devouring her now-cold breakfast. The only concrete information she'd gotten was that it had some kind of strange, non-standard locking mechanism, which was wholly consistent with what the Devon developer had told her after taking a look at the thing in person, and also that there wasn't a Pokémon registered to the strange Great Ball currently.

Which kinda, no_ really_, sucked, because the weirdly designed Great Ball was her only real lead in a string of Pokémon vanishings that she had a funny feeling were _also_ related to the rash of PokéMart thefts currently occurring across Hoenn, a rash of vanishings that she was currently being paid a good deal of money to try and solve by an owner of one of those currently vanished Pokémon.

"Ab_sol _ab absollll." Alicia could hear the worry in her female Absol Shadow's tone as she intently studied Alicia from her plush cushion in the living room. Alicia had spent a lot of time, effort and Pokédollars last year taking the Companion Licensing Exam and contacting breeders across the various region-states to get her hands on a Dark-type Pokémon partner and an Absol in particular, a highly intelligent species with a reputation for sensing impending danger or calamities as well as a Hoenn-native species Alicia had always loved. She'd been elated to find a very kind, reputable breeder in Sinnoh with a freshly hatched female after a few weeks of inquiries, and she'd made the long trip out to Greenstation Town two months later to pick Shadow up.

"Yeah, we're getting nowhere in a hurry, Shadow," Alicia replied to Shadow with a shake of her head. Of course she couldn't actually _understand_ Shadow, but they'd been a team long enough by now for Alicia to be able to pick up the gist of Shadow's speech through the Absol's tone and facial expressions, and in turn Shadow seemed to understand Alicia more and more with each passing day. "Maybe it's time to tell our client that Circe may be gone for good. Something smells enough with this one that I _really_ hate to give up on it, though." Circe was her client Richard Anson's beloved Dragonair companion, vanished like a Ghost-type into the night from her owner's mansion two weeks ago, the latest disappearance in a string that was greatly beginning to worry the Hoenn League. The strange Great Ball that she was currently in possession of, in fact, given to her by the distraught Richard and left behind at the scene, was the only evidence of anything _at all_ left behind as far as Alicia could tell from the records she'd managed to peruse.

She was folding up the letter when she realized that there was another envelope without an address or stamp of any kind on it sitting in the mail as well as she continued to sort out the junk mail and advertisements, a thin white envelope simply addressed to 'T**H**_e_ iN**vest**Iga_T_o_**R**_' in Common, the letters forming the word cut out from what looked like various Common-language magazines and newspapers. Alicia frowned, grabbing a pair of nearby gloves before carrying the letter out to the back side of her floating house, salty sea air filling her lungs as she debated whether or not to open the letter for several seconds, staring at it intently and studying it every which way. Alice held it up to the light, seeing nothing more than a folded piece of paper inside before deciding it was thin enough to risk opening while wearing her heavy gardening gloves. She extracted the piece of paper and opened it, surprise coloring Alicia's features as Shadow looked on anxiously, picking up on Alice's tension.

**L**o_O_k wE**s**_t_ t_o_ **Or**_r_E

**f**o_**R **_t_H_**e K**e**_y _**_t_O A**Ns**_We_**r **_y_O**u**r** c_I_**_p_**H**e_**r**_

R**e**_d _i**S s**a**F**e**t**_Y_

**A** C_o_**n**c_er_n**e**d _**F**r_IEn**d**

"That doesn't make sense," Alicia mumbled as she turned to Shadow, voicing her thoughts aloud to the Absol as she often found herself doing. "Orre's to the east geographically from us, not the west. And red is safety? What's that all about?" The Absol stared at her before offering her equivalent of a shrug, shaking her head in a 'no' motion and stretching her body forwards. "Time to call the Jenny investigating the case and see if she's gotten something similar, I think." In her travels around Hoenn and to the other region-states Alicia had always found it a bit creepy how eerily alike the entire Jenny family both appeared and sounded, but like the Joy family, there was no denying either the _absolutely massive_ family tree _or_ their hard, earnest work. True to form, Erin Jenny answered on the second ring of the Lilycove police station's non-emergency phone after Alicia wandered back inside her house and dialed, placing the letter down on the table open-faced.

"Lilycove police station, is this an emergency?" Erin then repeated the question in Common in case the caller was a visitor that didn't speak Hoennese.

"Nope, just Alice calling about that Dragonair disappearance I got hired for again. I hate to pester you, but I had a quick question or two if you have the time."

Erin loudly sipped on some coffee. "You caught me at a good time, actually, just going through the reports again hoping something new might shake loose. What do you need?" The officer let out out a disgruntled huff. "_Man_, is the Hoenn League starting to breathe down our necks about these disappearances, let me tell you. Actually, I _could_ probably make some money betting that the Global League has their eyes on these vanishings now, judging by a little visit I just wrapped up- Glacia Rhew, yes _that_ Glacia, was in here a bit ago asking a few questions and having me go through the most recent cases along with Steven Stone himself, which means the Global League has probably decided to ask our Elite Four members and Champion to step in directly at this point."

Alice chewed her lip as she concentrated. "I'm curious if you've gotten any letters or any leads that might hint at some kind of Orrean connection with this string of vanishings. I think we both know that Circe, my client's girl, is just the latest- the M.O. seems to match perfectly with all the others that have been reported over the past couple months, and she'd be worth a good deal of Pokédollars."

Erin hummed in thought. "I actually don't remember hearing anything like that. Did _you_ find out or hear something that makes you ask that?"

Alice glanced over to the odd Great Ball that currently held a place of honor on her bookshelf. "I mean, I showed you and the League investigator that weird Great Ball, but it didn't turn out to be much, so far at least. I wrote to Silph Co about it along with showing it to some Devon brains in person and it seemed like all either of them could say was that yeah, the locking mechanism's weird on it, just like we both thought from the start. Not much help." Shadow gave Alice a Look before pointedly jabbing her head in the direction of the open anonymous note and uttering a low, rumbling noise of discontent. Alice could tell what Shadow was thinking: _Mom, tell her about the weird letter. _"Anyhow, I was asking about Orre in particular because I got a weird note addressed to 'The Investigator' saying that I should be looking for some kind of Orrean connection in the west. Which, considering Orre's location, is pretty weird. _Someone_ sure took the time to figure out that I'd been hired by one of the affected trainers and then _also_ cut up a bunch of magazines and _also_ went to the trouble of directly dropping the thing in my mailbox, though, which really makes me wonder."

"That _is_ odd. I think my cousin's mentioned a small group of Orrean refugees that have settled in the old Slakoth Garden recently, come to think of it. Orreans mostly keep to themselves, of course, even more than the Unovans tend to, but maybe they'd know something?"

_And that old Garden is...to the west, smack dab between Lilycove and Fortree. Bingo._ Alice grinned broadly as she realized that her mystery 'friend' had probably been pointing her to that camp. "Thanks, I think I'll go talk to them. Don't want to keep you any longer, and you know if you need an extra brain or set of legs you can call on me any time."

"Same. Bye!" Erin cheerfully ended the call.

"Alright, Shadow. Let's take a little trip out to the old Gardens and see what we can find out." The Absol immediately, expectantly wandered over to the front door as Alice began gathering her coat, the odd Great Ball and a few other things to keep her safe during her trip- after putting on a beat-up, but comfortable and slightly too big bright red sweater, just in case.


End file.
